BBC Philharmonic, conducted by Mark Wigglesworth. Vaughan Williams: Symphony No 3 (Pastoral); On Wenlock Edge; Symphony No 5. Tenor soloist: Alessandro Fisher

Sadly, the underlying theme of this concert (two war-based symphonies) was only too relevant to the 26 February 2022, 4 days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I was pleased there were no speeches – the music said all that was necessary, and was appreciated by a pretty full Bridgewater Hall.

This was the first of a series of celebratory concerts for VW’s 150th birth anniversary – I think I am going to a few other concerts in this series. Compared to the Halle in recent months, the BBC Philharmonic seemed a bit under-strength (6 double-basses, 8 cellos) and scratchy – sounding. The strings had a less full sound than the Halle, possibly because of size or playing style, or positioning, the wind players were not very characterful, and the brass sounded occasionally tentative. What did come across very well in these readings was a sense of transparency in the orchestral sound – different contrapuntal layers were very clear, and also the Ravel influence could be very clearly be heard through that clarity of approach. There was no sense of warm mushiness or complacency – a coldness whistled through all the bars. But sometimes the playing did seem a little rhythmically fuzzy – whether this was Mark Wiggleworth’s or the players’ responsibility I am not sure

The VW3 I found a bit nondescript as a reading – the first two movements seemed rather much of a muchness and too unvaried (maybe that is just how the work is). The bugle playing was fine and haunting though……The scherzo went well and there were impassioned climaxes in the last movement. I always think having a male voice for the last movement is more appropriate – the link with WW1 better made and Mr Fisher made a fine contribution. Somehow this was much less moving than the performance I remember given by Martyn Brabbins and the BBCSO in July 2018

The VW5 went well in the first three movements, and the third, slow, one was very moving. I though Mark Wigglesworth took the last movement too fast, until slowing down for the peaceful conclusion. This is one of my favourite works, and I still remember the performance of it I heard first, in 1973 with Sir Adrian Boult at the Proms. I didn’t think at the time, but think now, how wonderful to hear this work performed by someone who had, if he had not been the conductor of its premiere, had known it, and the composer, intimately for all of its 30 years. How strange to hear it nearly 50 years later………But this was not as effective a performance as the LSO Rattle one given at the virtual Proms in 2020, a beautifully nuanced and subtle performance.

I enjoyed Mr Fisher’s singing of On Wenlock Edge very much but I did think – this was the 1920’s full orchestra version, a fruit of VW’s sessions with Ravel – that I would have preferred to hear the chamber music version; the snap and crackle of the string quartet in the first song would have much better conveyed the howling violent wind….

Vingt regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus,  Olivier Messiaen: Reinis Zariņš piano

This was the second of two concerts unexpectedly heard when my Welsh holiday was cancelled. I have a recording of this work (indeed two of them!) and therefore I know it to some extent. However, I have never been to a live performance, and probably another won’t come my way again….Messiaen’s vast cycle (1944) is a meditation on the infancy of Jesus. The first thing that struck me is how long the work is, listened to at one sitting – this performance was well over two hours. The second is, alongside that point, how little this performance felt like that. I was staggered after the concert when I looked at my watch and it said 21:46! That suggests that the performance had been exceptional in its concentration and communication. I very rarely lost focus. I think focus was helped by the decision (by the Hall? the pianist?) to do a surtitle sequence for each of the ‘Regards’, giving the number, name and the relevant Biblical quotation attached to it. The other, to my mind, rather staggering aspect of this performance is that Mr Zariņš was playing the work from memory –certainly (while not necessarily an indicator of musical quality) a considerable technical achievement and surely allowing him more mental space to focus on expression and timing. A previous UK performance a few years ago by Mr Zariņš, who comes from Latvia, had a very good review from The Guardian: his ‘embrace of the music’s monumentality and its intimacy was remarkable. Taking the 20-piece cycle in a single sweep and playing from memory, he riveted the attention: two hours … flew by, transcending time.’ My thoughts, exactly!  I really enjoyed re-listening to this work – it must be 3-4 years since I put my CD of it on, and I loved listening to the Turangalila Symphony-like splodgy sounds in some of the grander Regards. Mr Zariņš could both summon up extraordinary power for something like the Tenth Regard, and quiet stillness for some of the other movements. I thought this was an absorbing and impressive performance. The only spoiler was the gentleman in the audience who, after more than 2 hours of rapt silence, could not help himself, in the reverberating seconds of silence after the final chord, delivering an epic and very loud sneeze. I am sure people should be able to stifle their sneezes! There might be an audible grunt annoying a few people around you, if you stifled it, but this was a veritable explosion!

I should also say something about the acoustics of the Wigmore Hall – I was sitting fairly near to the back for both these concerts, but never experienced this as being distant and always felt engaged. The piano sound was resonant but not cloudy – just right for this work. What a great place to hear chamber and solo music, as many have said before……

Dmitry Shostakovich: Suite on Verses of Michelangelo Buonarroti Op. 145; Viola Sonata Op. 147: Ignat Solzhenitsyn, piano; Simon Barrad, baritone; Timothy Ridout, viola

Tuesday 22 February started with my assumption that I would be spending the next three days with an old friend of mine in Wales, half way up a valley without wifi, electricity and phone signal, a very agreeable prospect.  I set off on the train in relatively calm – even sunny – weather but became completely stuck at Shrewsbury – the trains to Machynlleth (where I was meant to be meeting my friend) weren’t running, and no taxis or rail replacement bus services could get through flooded roads in the aftermath of Storms Dudley, Eunice and Franklin. After 4 hours of hanging around Shrewsbury Station, seeing if any element of the situation was going to change (it wasn’t!), I gave up and decided to head for London to spend a couple of nights there and go to two Wigmore Hall programmes. This was the first of the two – and very good it was! Neither concert would have normally quite provoked me into the cost of a trip to London, but, as I was in holiday mode anyway, and given that I would in all probability never hear any of these works again live in my lifetime, it was definitely worth going!

The Shostakovich Michelangelo verses were written in the last years of his life – a kind of equivalent to Das Lied von der Erde. They are stark, spare, and definitely not full of lightness and humour….. not even much saracasm! Some of them deal with exile (in Shostakovich’s life, internal, though there were many whom he knew who were or became actual exiles – Rostropovich, for instance, or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and indeed the pianist at this performance, Ignat Solzhenitsyn, is the middle son of the author). Some of the songs expressed the difficulties of speaking truth to power and, for me, the two best, most immediate, ones were those entitled Death and Immortality. The latter used a piece of music which Shostakovitch had written when he was 9, thus giving that last song a sense of what he had achieved creatively over a span of 60 years of composing. It was sad to reflect on this distinguished contribution to Russian culture, and the beautiful sound of the Russian language, on the day when Putin recognised parts of the Ukraine as independent states, and two days before Ukraine as invaded. Simon Barrad, an American singer I’ve not come across before,  produced what sounded to me like idiomatic Russian singing, often with some beautiful sounds though occasionally a bit strained. I have never heard this work before. The spareness of gesture is impressive, and it is gripping throughout, even though at first there is seemingly little variation in tone

The Viola Sonata is work I know a little – I have a recording and have listened to it a few times. I really like it – the beautiful slow-moving last movement, based around a few phrases of the Moonlight Sonata, the very last of Shostakovich’s sardonic scherzos, with a hint of kletzmer, and the long dark opening movement. It is very affecting to hear that last movement as the final work Shostakovich ever completed. Timothy Ridout made a stunningly beautiful and mellow sound. I thought this was an outstanding performance – well worth missing a cold night in a remote Welsh cottage for…..

Martyn Brabbins, conductor; Jamie Manton, director; Tom Scutt, set & costumes;  Lucy Carter, lighting. Cast: Sally Matthews, Vixen; Pumeza Matshikiza, Fox; Lester Lynch, Forester; Madeleine Shaw, Forester’s Wife / Owl; Alan Oke, Schoolmaster / Mosquito; Clive Bayley, Priest / Badger; Ossian Huskinson, a Poacher; John Findon, Innkeeper / Cock; Gweneth Ann Rand, Innkeeper’s Wife / Hen; Claire Barnett Jones, Dog 

I braved storms and dodgy rail connections to get to this show, starting out from home near Sheffield at 0810, getting soaking wet on the way to the station in 50 mph winds, and getting to the Coliseum at 2.45pm. I was rewarded with a moving and lively new production, in fact having its opening performance (the original first night on Friday having been cancelled by Storm Eunice). The production handled the how-to-play-the-animals issue well – the vixen and fox were relatable to the audience but clearly different in lighting and costumes from the humans. Somehow the production gave far more emphasis to the animals than the humans. The schoolmaster and priest were much more cyphers than in some of the other productions I’ve seen – literally grey figures in dark costumes. Very effective community engagement work had led to a lot of extra children as animals too, emphasising this point, the centrality of the life of the animals. We saw or sensed little of the Forester’s inner life, his relationship with his wife, and there was none of the sexual tension you sometimes find in productions between the Vixen and Forester (though there was a splendid bit where the Forester and his wife plonked down on the sofa to see the telly, bewildering the Vixen….)

The set seemed to be a logging station in a forest, which emphasised the intersection of the lives of humans and animals. Colour and variety were given by vertical banners that streamed downward with fascinatingly different images of the natural world, though several sheds didn’t seem to be adding much. The human desolation and sadness for times passed and lost in the human world through climate change in the prelude to Act 3 was mirrored by the vertical banners representing the forest collapsing. A textile carpet of flowers appeared for the Forester’s final, moving reflections on nature. The animals for the most part were colourfully costumed and lit – I loved the frogs, and a special mention for the toadstools! I got a bit confused by the hens who seemed to turn up in the forest as part of the Vixen’s wedding…! On a couple of occasions, a door opened out to a blazing white at the back of the stage, I’m not sure what this was about- some sense of divine unity beyond the different worlds? There’s nothing in the text to suggest that, really……the opera celebrates the cyclic returns and transient beauty of Nature rather than anything transcendent. Sometimes I felt the design team had just been a bit defeated by the size of the Coliseum stage…on the other hand the starkness of the sets really threw you into the drama at the beginning which felt good – it took a while for me to remember what was supposed to be going on!

Musically the star of the show was the orchestra and Martyn Brabbins – some wonderfully sharp rhythmic and sensitive playing and the warmth of the Coliseum acoustic is ideally suited to Janacek’s orchestral sound. The sound at the end was glorious…. The chorus went astray once or twice in the wedding scene and weren’t fully as one with the orchestra but no doubt that’ll sort itself out in later performances. All the singers were strong – Lester Lynch was excellent in the Forester’s final soliloquy and Sally Matthews clear and lyrical throughout as the Vixen. There were some distinguished senior figures in some of the cameo roles – Clive Bayley and Alan Oke as priest and schoolmaster (whose diction was the best – some of the other singers required the audience to constantly refer to the surtitles. What, I wonder, did I do 50 years ago at the Coliseum if singers were unintelligible? I suspect the lack of surtitles impelled them to communicate more through clarity of diction, something that singers now don’t need to bother about…..)

Anyway, thoroughly recommended!!! (though I just received an email today saying that I have a ticket for the Barrie Kosky / Mirga Munich production of this work in July – will very much be looking forward to that!!)

Stravinsky – Funeral Song; Shostakovich – Concerto for Piano, Trumpet and Strings; Mahler – Symphony No.1. Conductor, Carlo Rizzi;  Sofya Gulyak, piano; Gareth Small, trumpet

This was a very enjoyable concert, based around the early works of three great masters. I think I heard the Stravinsky a few years ago at the Proms – it had been stuffed behind a cupboard at the St Petersburg Conservatoire at some point after its first performance in 1909 and lost for a century till rediscovered in 2015. Stravinsky’s tribute to his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov is a sombre affair, and, given how near it is in timing to the Firebird Suite, remarkably unlike the early ballets – far less flashy, far less folk-Russian, far less of a focus on rhythm. It sounded more like Scriabin or the Rachmaninov of the ‘Isle of the Dead’, and, I guess, indicates a ‘road not taken’ by Stravinsky.

I thought I knew the Shostakovich piece, but I think I was confusing it with the second concerto, and apart from the final riotous gallop, I hadn’t remembered much about it. I enjoyed this performance very much, though maybe it missed the last degree of mordant humour or crazy lack of restraint – maybe Ms Gulyak might have provided slightly more characterisation at points….But it was very good – the bite of the ‘romantic’ tunes, the underlying sardonic humour was well conveyed.

The Mahler symphony is one I have known since I was a teenager. Curiously I haven’t been to live performances of it very often – the best I can remember was by Simon Rattle and the Berlin Phil at the Proms in about 2016. This performance wasn’t in that league but was very good – the Halle brass again sounding very fine, as they did in the Mahler 3 a few weeks earlier, the woodwind providing very effective contributions in the first and third movements and the strings sounding deep and rich in the slow theme in the finale. It is in many ways an odd, lop-sided work – the frenzy of the two huge climaxes in the finale, the blast of brass, the triumphant sweep of the ending isn’t quite justified by what we’ve heard in the first three movements. However the performance swept away the doubts and I just accepted it for what it was – a great old friend from whom I have received much comfort and solace. Mr Rizzi’s conducting seemed to me to set excellent tempi for the first, third and fourth movements, but I thought the scherzo was too fast – it didn’t quite have the clod-hopping tendencies it should have, and just sounded busy. On the other hand, the gradation of climaxes in the finale, so that the first announcement of triumphal brass leaves sufficient extra volume for the second to be as powerful as it needs to be, was extremely well-handled. by Mr Rizzi and the orchestra A gratifyingly full (and this was the last of 3 performances) hall was very happy with the performance, as was I……..

STRAVINSKY ‘A Soldiers Tale’ Suite; BRAHMS Clarinet Sonata in E flat Op.120 No.2; MOZART Violin Sonata in G K301; BARTÓK Contrasts.  Ensemble 360 (Benjamin Nabarro, violin, plus Tim Horton, piano and clarinettist Matthew Hunt

This was an interesting and eclectic programme – unfortunately, the Ensemble 360 cellist who had originally been part of the mix, allowing the more substantial Brahms and Mozart Clarinet/Piano Trios to be performed, couldn’t make the performance, and so these were replaced by the pieces above, and the Bartok replaced a piece by Ades. This was a pity….although it was played very well, the Mozart Violin Sonata is a much less substantial piece than the Piano Trio it replaced. However, in an 18^th century, young Mozart, elegant, kind of way, it was very clearly and stylish played. I was particularly taken by Tim Horton’s piano playing which in its precision and crispness seemed exactly right for this piece. I loved the Stravinsky as well – the 3-instrument arrangement seemed a very good way in to the work, and indeed I enjoyed this set of excerpts much more than I’ve done hearing the real thing. The filling in of the story was also very well-narrated by Matthew Hunt

The Brahms I found a bit disappointing – I’ve really enjoyed over the last year exploring on disc some of the late works by Brahms I hadn’t really heard before – late piano music, clarinet works, viola sonatas, posthumous organ works. The Clarinet Sonata performance seemed to suffer a bit from a lack of melancholy/slowness/shading/ atmosphere; it all sounded a bit too precise and un-reflective, and definitely didn’t feel like an old man thinking about his life in a very soulful way (compared to say the classic recording of Gervase de Peyer and Daniel Barenboim).

I enjoyed the Bartok up to a point, but it didn’t really speak to me

Matthew’s encore was a hilarious late 19^th century piece – I didn’t catch the name of the composer – where the clarinet player stage by stage dismantles his instrument,  getting higher and squeakier in the process……..

Director, Adele Thomas; Set and costume designer, Molly O’Cathain, conductor, Peter Whelan; orchestra: Irish Baroque Orchestra. Cast: –  Bajazet: Gianluca Margheri; Tamerlano: James Laing; Asteria: Niamh O’Sullivan; Andronicus: Eric Jurenas; Irene: Claire Booth; Idaspe: Aoife Miskelly

Director, Adele Thomas; Set and costume designer, Molly O’Cathain, conductor, Peter Whelan; orchestra: Irish Baroque Orchestra. Cast: –  Bajazet: Gianluca Margheri; Tamerlano: James Laing; Asteria: Niamh O’Sullivan; Andronicus: Eric Jurenas; Irene: Claire Booth; Idaspe: Aoife Miskelly

This was a stunning evening of music drama, if ultimately a bit wearing….! Again, it’s quite an interesting question to ask – what would an early 18^th century Italian audience have expected from a performance of this work. I am sure that they would not be that interested in the silly plot, and that their main focus would have been on their favourite singers performing set-piece arias and on their favourite tunes (this is a pasticciato opera, meaning that it strings together arias from different operas that were popular at the time, as well as some original music by Vivaldi). This performance focused on strong singing and spectacularly good playing, all of which hopefully would have been to the taste of the original audience.  The fact that it was being performed in the Linbury Theatre, hollowed out of the depths below the Covent Garden building, meant it all felt very close and personal – a wonderful space to hear singers perform these taxing roles. There’s a nice trailer at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_iwm7SSD0Q

I have in the past in this blog grumbled about rushed over-emphatic period instrument performances, but this really needed the bite and snap, the propulsive beat, which the Irish Baroque Orchestra provided. The 11 players offered rasping Baroque strings, whooping Baroque horns, and the deep growls of the strummed theorbo, giving therefore a huge bounce and zest to each aria, with an outstanding rhythmic punch that made the fastish ones among them almost danceable – and indeed the crazy Tamerlano did cavort to some of them! Many of the arias moved with whiplash energy, and had the characteristically Vivaldi flurries of strings we’ve heard from his concertos, with Richard Whelan bouncing up and down, directing the performance from his harpsichord, to add to the energy.

The set – there was only one – was a wooden walled set of boxes, essentially a prison cell but which, with light, could also be a palace and which could turn from grey to gold with lighting combinations. The only props were a large chain and ball attached to the ceiling, for the imprisoned Bajazet at various points, a tray of glasses, and a hypothermic syringe to sedate Tamerlano with from time to time (and eventually kill him!)

Stand out star was James Laing as a psychopathic ruler of the first magnitude, limping and lurching crazily across the stage until sedated or collapsing in a seizure. Goodness knows what he was doing to his counter-tenor voice in the process but the results were thrilling. The other strong performers on stage were the Asteria, Niamh O’Sullivan, the spectacular Irene, Claire Booth, who had the most gob-stoppingly difficult aria of the evening (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSzctuPiNWM where someone else performs this), while Aoife Miskelly had a delightful stage presence as the watchful and faintly disapproving Iaspe, with the every-ready syringe to hand.  As Bajazet, Gianluca Margheri doesn’t have to do much apart from sound noble, and Eric Jurenas made the best he could of the part given to the feeble Andronicus.

For the first hour and a half, I bounced along with the cast, foot-tapping and feeling energised. Ultimately it got too much and I just felt exhausted by this thriller of an opera by the end – but a great evening with some remarkable singing!

Director, Jonathan Kent; Revival Director, Amy Lane; Designer, Paul Brown, conductor Marco Amiliato. Cast – Floria Tosca: Angela Gheorghiu; Mario Cavaradossi: Stefan Pop; Baron Scarpia: Michael Volle; Spoletta: Aled Hall; Cesare Angelotti: Chuma Sijeqa

I last saw this production about 4 years ago. Like Rigoletto, there is only a limited amount a production team can do (with? to?) Tosca – you basically have to ensure the story is told well. In this production, the sets are realistic, heavy and built to last. They are dimly lit, but I suppose that’s OK in a church, a candle lit house and a fort before dawn…There’s not much sense of interventionist directing but all three of the principals knew their way well enough around their roles for this not to be bothering, and were all very credible. Everything on stage seemed very smooth and nothing was out of place.

I haven’t seen Angela Gheorgiou live before, and, given that her ROHCG debut was 30 years ago, I wanted to be sure I had had the chance to see and hear her live before it was too late, putting it delicately. I have to say I was very impressed. While loud top notes can now sound a bit frayed and wobbly, a lot of her soft singing is beautiful, and she has a wonderful way of articulating the text and pointing her words. Vissi d’Arte sounded very good indeed. She also has the passion and fire for the role in how she moves, how she projects the text and how she sings it – she has that indefinable sense of presence on stage that all great singers have. Tosca is a role I would imagine it is possible to go over the top in, but this was a gripping rendition that could also be quite funny at times in the first act, and never crashed over into melodrama. Stefan Pop, a fellow Rumanian, had a great voice but was not terribly gripping as an actor, conveyed little sense of passion, and didn’t do much out of the ordinary as a singer  – but did very well indeed within the confines of an ‘international – standard Cavaradossi’ presentation. Michael Volle I’ve only heard once live before, as Hans Sachs in Bayreuth in 2017. He seems to be extraordinarily hard-working – I see his name everywhere. He was appropriately dominating and threatening as a presence – maybe not much subtlety of approach to musical nuancing but arguably Scarpia isn’t that kind of guy…..

If I was less than overwhelmed by this performance it was because I thought the conductor was a bit over-leisurely with his tempi. I haven’t come across Marco Amiliato before, but he is clearly a very experienced conductor of the Italian repertory, and has been working at ROHCG and the Met for about 20 years. Some of his tempi brought out shades and aspects of the music I hadn’t remembered, but somehow there wasn’t the vibrancy and the tension that you need in Act 2, and the orchestra sometimes sounded a little genteel, surely inappropriate in this eminently vulgar work (and also not loud enough, but that could be the cushioned Covent Garden acoustics)……Ms Gheorgiou seemed to be having lots of problems in moving around in her dresses and shoes, something I hope the costumes department sorts out. The other slight irritant is the silly habit English audiences have got into over the last decade or so in boo-ing the villain in the curtain calls as though it were a pantomime. No great harm I suppose but it must be very disconcerting for a foreign artist if no-one has explained to them what is happening, and…..where does it stop? – are people going to start booing Klingsor?

I’m glad I went but it wasn’t quite the experience it could have been – all 5 performances are completely sold out, so I hope some more electricity is generated during the run

Director, Katie Mitchell; Set designer, Chloe Lamford; Conductor, Harry Bicket. Cast – Theodora: Julia Bullock; Irene: Joyce DiDonato; Didymus: Jakub Józef Orlinski; Septimius: Ed Lyon; Valens: Gyula Orendt; Marcus: Thando Mjandana

It’s interesting that while we place huge emphasis now on what musical performance practice would sound like for Handel, and what authentic instrumental sounds would be appropriate, directors don’t necessarily consider what (in this case) an 18^th century audience coming to Theodora for the first time would bring with it in terms of expectations and assumptions. Would they bring a Gibbon-ish suspicion of the Christians and feel automatically for the Roman position, or would they be conflicted between – probably-taken-for grant-but-nonetheless–real – Christian faith, and their 18^th century approval of classical Roman values and culture? In fact, my reading of the performance history of Handel’s oratorios is that their audience would have been the solid commercial middle classes, so it is likely probably that the piety angle would have predominated. How well then would Katie Mitchell’s production have served that 18^th century English audience? Pretty well, actually, in the sense of a group of Christians being shown as who they were and under clear oppression – there were scenes of a baptism for Didymus, a wedding with a priest for Didymus and Theodora, some signs of the cross – it was thus clear throughout who the Christians in the opera were, and that they were being oppressed.  

It was less clear how the concept of the ‘Roman Embassy’, with the Christians working as domestic staff and an unpleasant male group of Roman diplomats, really fitted with the overall theme of the opera. It would have been much better to show how the Christians were being oppressed by a brutal regime with obviously wider powers than just an ‘Ambassador’. I guess part of the point was to show the male aggression exhibited by suave suited diplomats, the exploitation of the female Christians, and the feminine resistance to it, but I am not sure that the feminist angle totally worked well alongside the Christian persecution aspect. The programme notes referred to the contemporary Richardson novel, Clarissa, and this was obviously part of the production’s thinking – but I am not sure that Christian martyrdom Is quite as meek and submissive as Clarissa’s personality would suggest……This difficult blend of feminism and Christianity was at its most incoherent and glaring at the end of the opera, where, rather than submitting to martyrdom, the Christians rise up and kill their male Embassy oppressors, rescuing Theodora and Didymus. The reviews, and maybe the programme notes, referred to a Christian fundamentalist terrorist group, but this really didn’t come across clearly in what I saw on stage – one reviewer, I remembered after the performance, had mentioned bomb-making going on in the first scene, but this wasn’t at all obvious from what I saw. The other issue for me was what was happening to Irene – while it was clear enough at every stage what was happening to Theodora, Irene’s fate seemed a bit mixed-up. She was arrested at the same time as Theodora but not subjected to the same penalties and she seemed to be carrying on working in the same kitchen – or was she being hidden away from the male Roman Embassy staff by other Christians in the kitchen? Not clear…

However within the frame of the ultimate feminism/Christianity incoherence I thought the production worked well enough. The set was a series of boxed frames, a set of stages within a stage, representing from left to right, a plush brothel, a sleazy pole-dancing bar, the main reception area, a corridor, the kitchens where the Christians worked, and the utility room-cum-store room, with haunches of meat hanging down and whirring spin-driers. The stage boxes moved so that you could see at any one time two or three of them. The sleazy aspect – red plush seats for the pole dancing bat – was extremely well – but not over-done. The disadvantage of the framed boxes is that they put the singers quite far back on the stage, and to some extent must have cramped their acting style – possibly also boxed in their voices to some extent. There was, perhaps inevitably a lot of ‘business’ going on around the long arias, and some very well-conceived slow-motion movement scenes – not least the killing of the male Embassy staff, which was very effective and convincing.  

There were many gorgeous arias, and a very good group of singers to deliver them. Maybe Julia Bullock came across less well than she might otherwise have done because of the boxed structures – her voice didn’t really soar or have the introspective beauty of Joyce DiDonato or Jakub Józef Orlinski, and I thought occasionally the orchestra over-powered her (maybe in Mitchell’s conception that’s part of Theodora’s struggle). The tenor and bass were good too. All had the vocal agility to deal with Handel’s complex vocal writing. The stand-out moment, perhaps inevitably, was the lovely “As with rosy steps the Morn” – one of Handel’s most beautiful arias and sung by Joyce DiDonato with one of those moments only opera delivered at its best can offer – as her voice floated into the theatre in its higher range, that special form of silence took hold of the auditorium and time stopped……. Very near it in intensity was her unaccompanied singing in ‘Lord, to Thee each night and day’, compellingly intimate and soft. Harry Bicket kept things moving with the orchestra without launching into Baroque scrambles

Director – Bartlett Sher; Designer Michael Yeargan; Quinn Kelsey, Rigoletto; Rosa Feola, Gilda; Piotr Beczała, Duke of Mantua; Sparafucile, Andrea Mastroni;  conductor Daniele Rustioni

This is the first cinema screening from the Met or ROHCG I’ve been to since the start of the pandemic. The last one was a Met performance of Handel’s Agrippina in January 2020. It was lovely to be back in the Curzon in Sheffield, gin and tonic in hand, watching the show, and I find these events really quite exciting – they give a very good sense of a live performance and have some excellent interviews and backstage images

‘Rigoletto’ is one of those operas you can’t do much with, in terms of directoral input – it’s fast moving, with 3 vividly-drawn characters, and your main job as a director is to make it exciting and  dramatic, so that it grips you and doesn’t drag. (although Opera North’s recent new production does seem to have done something different and exciting – but I am afraid the thought of 3 Rigolettos in a single season is more than I can bear. On the whole in this live screening the director achieved a degree of engagement, though the cameras went in relentlessly for close ups and there wasn’t a clear sense of how the crowds were being managed in the scenes where they were present. However, for some not very clear reason, the production team decided to frame the work within the context of the Weimar Republic. This really contributed nothing to the evening – for a start, it would have been preposterous in that context to have so many of the aristocratic, military types we saw on stage. Although the designer got to create some nice art deco sets, there was nothing otherwise Weimar-ish about the production beyond ‘flapper’ wigs and clothes, as  well as a few blokes in leather jackets and coats. The director referred to proto-fascism on stage, in an interval interview, but this didn’t really come across in any meaningful way in what I saw. The sets were massive and looked far too large for the human dramas which they over-arched.

I thought Rosa Feola was an excellent Gilda – maybe not in the Oropesa class, (see October review) but with a very effective stage presence and lots of beautiful singing. She was particularly good in the 3 and 4^th act, in seeming credible in both her sense of loss of, and continued love for, the Duke. Piotr Beczała got off to a slightly strained start but thereafter sounded splendid, in full control, if with not always very shaded or nuanced phrasing – but maybe that is OK for someone who is not a very sensitive individual. Beczala was not a particularly convincing actor – other than in conveying a degree of smugness, but, again, maybe that is right for this role…… Quinn Kelsey as Rigoletto was, I thought, excellent – some sympathetically warm singing, and , critically, not overdoing it in terms of his acting. There was a brilliant cameo from Andrea Mastroni who looked the epitome of evil as Sparafucile! Daniele Rustioni conducted vigorously and pushed the drama along with the right degree of briskness